"Hollywood dragged its feet for years," said Rod Tirrell, conservation chairman of the Broward County chapter of the Sierra Club. "But we are glad they finally came on board."

Recycling services should be available by August to about 30,000 households. Residents will sort glass, plastic, steel cans, aluminum and newspapers into special bins for once-a-week pickup.

The delay was caused by six years of negotiations between the city and Harold Solomon, a local businessman who said he could develop a recycling program that would separate all recyclable materials at a specialized plant.

City officials long supported the project for the convenience and low costs it offered. Residents would not have to sort their trash into special bins. Dumping fees were guaranteed to be lower than what the city pays to Broward County for incineration.

But the project ran into numerous financial and regulatory roadblocks. In January, the city severed ties with Solomon after he was unable to come up with financial backing for the $16.2 million project.

"Why we fooled around with that pie-in-the-sky plan for six years I will never know," said Vice Mayor Cathy Anderson, an avid environmentalist.

In the meantime, cities like Fort Lauderdale, Coral Springs and Plantation have been consistently recycling more household wastes per year than Hollywood.

A look at other years since 1991 shows a consistent pattern of Hollywood falling behind other cities in recycling household garbage.

"Hollywood should have gone with what everyone else knew worked," said Chuck Nicholson, Fort Lauderdale's collections and recycling manager.

The garbage that Hollywood recycles is collected in 110 drop-off bins throughout the city. Separated piles of newspapers also are collected for recycling on regular garbage pickup days.

Hollywood isn't the only city that gambled on an unconventional recycling system and lost. Recycling shut down in Pembroke Pines, Pompano Beach, Dania and Hallandale when Waste Management of Florida in December quit hand-sorting trash at its plant.

When recycling is restarted in those four cities, it likely will involve a conventional curbside program.

Hollywood's recycling efforts have improved in the past year since it began a pilot curbside program that serves about 3,000 households. By October, the end of fiscal 1996, the city estimates it will have recycled 4,084 tons of trash.

Still, that is less than the 6,000 tons of garbage the city projects it will recycle in the first year of its new citywide program.

Rick Wolf, Hollywood's sanitation superintendent, said the sale of recyclables and the savings in dumping fees will cover the $400,000 annual cost of the new curbside program.

Wolf said Hollywood saved money by delaying curbside recycling until now. Curbside programs were not profitable in the early 1990s because of the low resale value of recycled materials, he said.

Hollywood has done an effective job of recycling other materials, said Lorie Mertens, city recycling coordinator.

Besides newspaper recycling, the city has programs to recycle tires, yard brush and "hard junk" like discarded appliances and furniture, she said.

Combined with its new curbside service, the recycling programs will account for nearly 30 percent of the 63,350 tons of garbage the city estimates it will collect next year.